Ta-Nehisi Coates, Talk, 18 March 2015

good evening thank you so much for joining us for what I know is going to be a very very very special evening and thanks so much to the Lanham foundation for their forethought in inviting Tallahassee coats to join us this evening and what a time to be having this conversation I know that you all watch the news and perhaps listen to the news and so you know it is indeed fortuitous that he is here with us this evening I'm Michele Norris and after tenacity speaks this evening I'll have a chance to ask him a few questions and dive a little bit deeper into his work and how he does his work and who he is as a man and before he begins let me tell you just a little bit about who he is as a man and forgive me as I get older I have to carry devices with me to help me remember things instead of pieces of paper tallahassee coats is a writer a journalist and educator he is a student and a professor he's an Oracle he's a sage he's a seer and a compass at a very important moment in American history he is a treasure and we are we are so fortunate to be able to spend this evening with him tonight he also has some official titles he's a senior editor for the Atlantic where he writes about culture politics and social issues he's a former writer for the Village Voice in the Washington City Paper he's been a contributor to Time magazine to O Magazine to the near times magazine he's contributed to both the New York Times and The Washington Post newspapers he's a prolific voice in social media where he shares his insights where he instigates debate spars with people who used the forum to speak in a matter that recalls the James Brown song loud and saying nothing Tana haci is often the person who will lean in and say do you want to clarify what you were trying to say in 2008 he published a memoir the beautiful struggle I hope that you grab a copy of it at the end of this evening a beaut the beautiful struggle a father two sons and an unlikely road to manhood is the full title his recent piece published in the Atlantic titled the case for representations excuse me intricately and provocatively traces the history of racism in the United States from slavery to recent examples of housing discrimination I hope that you have all had a chance to read this piece if you haven't I'm giving you an assignment you need to read this piece you will have a better understanding of the country that you love even though you might not love everything you read in that piece I understand that there are a lot of students in the audience tonight I'm giving you a particular assignment you must read that piece and you must understand how special it is to be in this theater tonight I think it would be much like me being in high school and being able to watch James Baldwin on stage because for some of us that's how we see tallahassee Coates my dear friend isabel wilkerson calls him our James Baldwin and that is truly the way that many of us see him the case for reparations set a single-day traffic record for the magazine site at the Atlantic the Atlantic's website and the attention at his garnered has given him a platform and a forum to wrestle with questions of identity both blackness and whiteness questions of fairness and justice and what it means for America to live up to its promise well I'm gonna promise you something this is going to be a very special evening I'm gonna make way for the man that you've all come here to see please join me in welcoming Tallahassee Coates I hope somebody was recording that because I'm gonna send that to my mother tell her I got an introduction from Michel Norris I have you know made my life into something I'm joking but that you know this is like a really really special moment for me you know you grow up and you listen to people you know and you idolize people and you look up to people and and Michel you know in her journalism has always been able to combine a kind of grace and intelligence at the same time and I've always been deeply envious to that because all I know how to do is just pick up the battle-ax right and just knock people upside two-handed views it's I say that it really is a high honor you know to be here and to receive that that beautiful beautiful introduction thank you so much Michelle thank you thank you we are Michelle alluded to this in the introduction we're living in a particular time that is in some ways seems different but may in fact not actually be very different at all yesterday I'm sure some of you or and maybe not all of you went on the yacht in New York Times website or whatever you know media website you know you tend to frequent and you saw a video of a police officer shooting black man in the back gunning him down and then doing what what appears to be what appears to be planting evidence you know nm to justify what would appear to be a cold-blooded murder and I got a note I was on the plane coming here and I was getting ready boy and I got a note from my politics out of there and he said listen I know you you know you think about this stuff all the time you care about this so much there's so many people paying attention you know this would be a good time for you to write something and I sat down and I tried to write and it just felt like cheating because I realized I was just saying the same thing over and over and over again the fact of the matter is when we have one of these incidents come up we have this hyper micro focus on the incident you know we think about the police for certain how awful the police officer was and what you know police officer did in that act and you know I I don't really have a beef with that I'm not here to defend a police officer who shoots a man in a back in the back but we had a case of a few weeks ago there's a man in Atlanta who was leaping off of his balcony he was having you know some sort of mental issues and he was stalking knocking and he was shot down - I just came from Madison Wisconsin and students up there were all the fire for a young man up there who had gotten high on mushrooms and was chasing a car and somebody called the cops and somehow he ended up dead - I come from you know New York City where over the summer we had Eric garner you know who was out on the street selling cigarettes and somehow he ended up dead - I think at some point like it's good to pause for a second to even put the outrage and anger on pause for a second and just back up a little bit and see if we can connect the dots and one of the things I want to suggest to you is that there's a line running through the last 30 or 40 years in terms of how we deal with which should be social service in our cities and what we have decided is that we will cut back on social service and we will send the police and to deal with every single issue so this guy is like missing a taillight and dinner a child-support warrant comes up on and we decide the way to deal with that is to send somebody in who has been authorized by the state to kill to use as much force as he deems necessary we have a gentleman who's having a mental health issue in our way of responding to that is to send somebody in who is authorized to kill in the name of the state we have somebody having a drug issue and our response to that is to send in somebody who we've authorized to kill to use as much force as he deems necessary and if you know anything about the jurors jurisprudence this country it's very very hard very very hard to you know first of all get a police officer actually lose his job due to use of force much less be convicted of anything we have pretty much given carte blanche to officers to use as much force as sorry maybe that's right maybe that's wrong but the fact of the matter is we are deploying force to solve our problems we are deploying people with guns our police officers are not drug counselors police officers are not mental health professionals police officers are not you know caseworkers you know if you're dealing with council but our answer is not to deploy people who have expertise in these fields somehow it's to deploy police officers and you can see this like logic running through like when Sandy Hook happened the answer was to put guns in the hands of teachers to make teachers more like the police in fact and the idea is that guns can solve all our problems that we can you know deploy force and all our problems and I would just you know suggest to you that it's not a mistake that we have you know had this you know decision that we decided that this is the way we want to answer our problems over the last 40 years and that that movement follows right off of the end of the civil rights movement as I think you know we could do ourselves a favor by just stepping back for a second you know I saw the May he said he wanted to put body cameras you know on everybody now you know I'm for body cameras but I think the question needs to be asked why are we sending the police in the first place why are you deploying the police in the first place it makes everybody feel good you get your blood up when you get to talk about how bad this guy was you know anger serves the kind of purpose we can all unify around our rage you know around the fact that a man should not be shot in the back and had a Taser planning on well that's a easy call that's an easy call the hard calls are the calls that cost money this was not too far from what we saw down in Ferguson also I mean if you think about it right we had the Justice Department report that comes out and we find that basically Ferguson has turned its police force into a tax collection agency that the police are being used basically as a funding mechanism for municipal government why is that happening what's going on there's a broader social safety net a brought a social question that confronts us besides you know what it's bigger than body cams it's bigger than a few bad police officers I've been thinking about this for some time been thinking about actually since I was a child in West Baltimore to be honest didn't even know I was thinking of it but I was and I've come to this point where I have a you know a child myself was growing up in this time you know and it's becoming you know politically conscious in this time you know and it's having you know things revealed to him in this time and you know he the president that he will remember most will be an african-american president you know and yet he sees in this city you know what's going on with Aragon he saw what happened down in Ferguson you know he's seeing you know what happened yesterday down in our south it's just too many cases to name it to be honest they just way way way too many and it's affecting his consciousness and I had an idea about a year and a half ago because this really you know ghost goes back to try to explain to my son to give him some insight into what it meant to become conscious in this world how you were supposed to deal with yourself how you were supposed to carry yourself and as it turns out you know I had you know quite a bit of experiences I mentioned earlier that I've been thinking about this since I was you know a really really young man he's the question of your body the question of your bodily safety it's so key to african-american identity it's been key since the moment we got here as enslaved people's that is remain the key if you look at the kind of neighborhoods that we tend to grow up in the kind of exposure to violence and violation of our bodies that we experience the question of your body is so key in the police you know killing by the police being shot in the back having a Taser playing on it's just the superlative form of that but it takes so many other forms and you know flicks us in in so many ways and I got to thinking how can I talk to my son about this and as it happened I had a book contract for a book I hadn't written yet problem/solution see how that works no but IIM serious I mean I will you know write a book out of nothing this was a you know a very very real question in about that time I had finished writing the case for reparations which you know if not you know including too much about police violence it's really you know trying to get folks to look past you know to open the conversation up a little bit more to pause and get beyond the immediacy you know at the moment which we as journalists you know sometimes I have a bias towards in the public at large has a bias towards let me get to the point I have a book coming out in October we're almost done well actually almost no I think galleries are gonna be out in a month you know we're you know I'm just doing in the last quite a hackling and and and this thing happens yesterday and this book is all about this thing and how you cope with this thing when I was a young man at Howard University I had a friend by the name of Prince Jones when people will say things like twice as good that that's who Prince Jones is when your parents urged you to go be prices good that suit Prince Jones is or I should say was six foot four you know he's been an athlete in high school handsome big beautiful smile you know intelligent deeply deeply religious he was born again and just incredibly incredibly smart Prince was from Dallas area and he attended a magnet school in Texas and the magnet school was for math and science and you know for the entire four years he was there he was the only african-american student there Texas is a big state and you know you can imagine being the only black kid there is pretty incredible and his mom had been you know relatively affluent she had grown up and grinding poverty had rose you know become a radiologist and was doing pretty well she gave prints all the best things that he wanted and that meant you know because you know she wanted the best for him and enlarged respect he didn't really grow up around african-americans and Danielle when he turned 18 and it was time for him to go away he decided he wanted to come to Howard University there generally two types of people that come to Howard University where I went to school there are people who you know have grown up around nothing but black people and you know kinda don't know any better like me and then they're people who have grown up around white people and I just tie it and want to be around people that look like them you know and I'm not tired because white people you don't have lighter skin than them you know they're not tired because white people have blonde hair you know they are tired because they you know spend a great deal of their scholastic experience explaining themselves interpreting themselves being a spokesperson for other groups of people in at Howard University you kind of was just free to be and I met Prince John's there and I adored Prince John's and I you know I loved them and he's just a beautiful guy I can remember the last time I saw him I was at the German he was you know throwing really well and he was you know about to finish up at Howard and you know and every time I taught him you know you just had this warm you know sort of glowing feeling as you walked away and in September of 2000 of Prince Jones Prince Jones was driving from Prince George's County and he had dropped his daughter off to you know stay with some friends for the night and he was going to see his fiancee and the police in Prince George's County were out looking for somebody who had stolen stolen an officer's gun and they confused his Jeep with this gentleman's the gentleman who day confuse them with was roughly like five eight or something like that Prince was about six four they follow Prince Jones out of Prince George's County through Washington DC into Virginia within mere yards of his fiancée's house and they shine they killed him and I was at home and I you know I picked up the you know I was checking through the papers and I saw the papers in Prince George's County has one of the most brutal police departments of Michel knows all about this one of the most brutal police departments in the country I had at that time definitely and so when to hear that they had shot somebody you know under such circumstances was not a particularly original insight and I remember you know the first time I saw it I just kind of looked away then the next day it was news again and I saw that the person who had gotten shot was from Howard University and on the third day I looked and there was a picture of my brother Prince Jones and it was devastating it was utterly utterly devastating but not as devastating as the fact the officer who shot him was never charged with anything not as devastating as the fact that the officer who shot him was returned to the streets to go out and patrol other people not as devastating as later finding out that that officer had a history of lying in every single case that he had been involved in the prosecutor had to throw out that was devastating that was devastating and I carried that with me and I have carried that with me for so long and when it came time to do this book I was so interested in you know just going back and trying to explore what that meant to me and I wanted to explain it to my son and and of course he doing that I went to see our prince Jones's mother who lived in who lives in Philadelphia and I just wanted to talk to her a little bit about her so I had never met her I wanted to hear about him through her eyes and I'm gonna take a second I tonight Michel was your wood on the right of the left okay all right you sure whispered to me about which what I could take you didn't take any though right I'm gonna take the right I may need both III went to see his mother and I you know obviously his mother had a very very different perspective I had never met her before I'd seen her all right one of the observances and it was devastating and so I want to read to you tonight about I'm going to see the mother of Prince Jones Mable Jones is her name the book is written as an address to my son so when you see the use it just imagine be out talking to my my 14 year old son Sumari I did not die in my aimless youth I did not perish in the agony of not knowing I was not jailed I had proven to myself that there was some other way out there I felt myself to be among the survivors of some great natural disaster some plague some Avalanche or earthquake and now living in the wake of decimation and having arrived at a land that I once considered mythical everything seemed cast in halo your route will be different it must be you new things at 11:00 that I did not know when I was 25 when I was 11 my highest priority was the simple security of my body my life was the immediate negotiation of violence within my house and without but already you have expectations I see that in you survival and safety are not enough your hopes your dreams if you will leave me with an array of warring emotions I am so very proud of you your openness your ambition your aggression your intelligence my job in the little time we have left together is to match that intelligence with wisdom part of that wisdom is understanding what you were given a city where all the gay bars are unremarkable to you a soccer team on which half the players speak some other language what I am saying is that it does not all belong to you that the beauty in you is not strictly yours and largely is the result of enjoying an abnormal amount of security in your black body perhaps that is why when you discovered the killer of Mike Brown would go unpunished you told me you had to go perhaps that is why you were crying because in that moment you understood that even your relatively privileged security can never match a sustained assault launched in the name of the dream our current politics tell you that should you fall victim to such an assault and lose your body it somehow must be your fault Trayvon's mark Trayvon Martin's hoodie got him killed Jordan Davis's loud music did the same John Crawford should never have touched the rifle on display kazumi pile should have known better than to be easy and all of them should have had fathers even the ones who had fathers even you without its own justification the dream would collapse upon itself you first learned this from Michael Brown I first learned it from Prince Jones the right to capture our bodies built on a foundation of phrenology is so ingrained that it is barely questioned Michael Brown did not die so many of his defenders supposed and still the question behind the questions I never asked should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense rented without trial with the judge with the officer as judge and executioner is that what we wish civilization to be and all the time the dreamers are pillaging Ferguson for municipal governance and they are torturing Muslims and they drones are bombing wedding parties and the dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exalting non-violence for the weak and maximum guns for the strong each time a police officer engages us death injury maiming is possible it is not enough to say that it is that this is more true of anyone or more true of criminals the moment the officers began the pursuit of French Jones his life was in danger the dreamers accept this as the cost of doing business they accept your body as currency because it is their tradition as slaves we were this country's windfall the down payment on its freedom after the ruin and liberation of the Civil War came redemption for the unrepentant South and reunion and our bodies became this country's second mortgage in the New Deal we were their guests room their finished basement and today with a sprawling prison system which has turned the warehousing of black bodies into a jobs program for dreamers and a lucrative investment for dreamers today when 8% of the world's prisoners are black men our bodies have refinanced the dream of being white black life is cheap but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value in the years after Prince Jones died I thought often of those who were left to make their lives in the shadow of his death I thought of his fiance and I wondered where they were meant to see their future lives i bended with no explanation I wondered what she would tell his daughter I wondered how his daughter would imagine her father when she would miss him how she would detail the loss but mostly I wondered about princes mother and the question I mostly axe was always the same how did she live I searched for her phone number online I emailed her she responded then I called and made an appointment to visit I could not imagine how she possibly lived but living she was just outside of Philadelphia in a small gated community of affluent homes it was a rainy Tuesday when I arrived I had taken the train in from New York and then picked up a rental car I was thinking a lot of prints in those months before you and your mother and I had gone to homecoming at Howard and so many of our friends were there and Prince was not dr. Jones greeted me at the door she was lovely polite Brown she appeared to be somewhere in that range between 40 and 70 years when it becomes difficult to precisely ascertain a black woman's precise age she was well composed given the subject of our conversation and for most of the visit I struggled to separate how she actually felt from what I felt she must be feeling what I felt right then was that she was smiling through her pain eyes that the reason for my visit had spread sadness like a dark quilt over the whole house I seem to recall music jazz or gospel playing in the background but conflicting with that I also remember a deep quiet overcoming everything I thought that perhaps she had been crying I could not tell for sure she led me into her large living room there was no one else in the house it was early January her Christmas tree was still standing at the end of the room and there were stockings bearing the name of her daughter and her lost son and there was a framed picture of him Jones on a display table she brought me water and a heavy glass she drank tea she told me that she was born and raised outside of Opelousas Louisiana that how ancestors have been enslaved in that same region and as a consequence of that enslavement I fear I go down to the ages it first became clear to me when I was four she told me my mother and I were going into the city we got on the Greyhound bus I was behind my mother she wasn't holding my hand at the time and I popped down in the first seat I found a few minutes later my mother was looking for me and she took me to the back of the bus and explained why I couldn't sit there we were very poor and most of the black people around us who I knew were poor also and the images I had of white America were going were going into the city and seeing who was behind the counter in the stores and seeing who my mother worked for it became clear there was a distance this chasm makes itself known to us in all kinds of ways a little girl wanders home at age seven after being teased in school and acts our parents are we and what does this mean sometimes it is subtle the simple observation of who lives where and works with jobs and who does not sometimes it is all at once I have never asked you how you personally became aware of the distance I don't think I want to know but I know that it has happened to you already that you have deduced that you are privileged and yet still different from other privileged children because you are the bearer of a body more fragile than any other in this country what I want you to know is that this is not your fault even if it is ultimately your responsibility it is your responsibility because you are surrounded by the sleepless by the dreamers it has nothing to do with how you wear your pants or how you style your hair the breach is as intentional as policy as intentional as the forgetting that follows the breach allows for the efficient sorting of the plundered from the plunderers the enslaved from the enslavers sharecroppers from land holders cannibals from food dr. Jones was reserved she was what people once referred to as a lady and in that sense reminding me of my mother who was a single mother in the projects but all we spoke is though she had nice things and when dr. Jones described her motive for escaping the dirt that marked the sharecropper life of her father and all the others around her when she remembered herself saying I'm not gonna live like this I saw the iron in her eyes and I remembered the iron and my grandmother's eyes you must barely remember her by now you were six when she died I remember her of course but by the time I knew her her exploits how for once she scrubbed white people's floors during the day and went to school at night what legend but I could still feel the power and rectitude that propelled her out of the projects and into home ownership it was the same power I felt in the presence of dr. Jones when she was in second grade she and another girl made a pact that they would both become doctors and she held up her end of the bargain but first she integrated the high school in her town at the beginning she fought the white children who insulted her at the end they voted her class president she ran track it was a great entree she told me but it only brought her so far into their world at football games that other students would cheer the black star running back and then when a black player on the other team got the ball they'd yell killed that killed that they would yell this sitting right next to her as though she really were not there she gave Bible recitations as a child and told me the story of her recruitment into this business her mother took her to an audition for the junior choir afterwards the choir director said honey I think you should talk she was laughing lightly now not at Bruce Lee still in control of her body I felt she was warming up and as she talked to the church I thought of your grandfather the one you know and how his first intellectual adventures were founded in the recitation of Bible passages I thought of your mother who did the same and I thought of my own distance from the church that has so often been the support for our people I often wonder if in that distance I've missed something some notions of cosmic hope some wisdom beyond my mean physical perception of the world something beyond my body that I might have transmitted to you I wondered this at that particular moment because something beyond anything I had ever understood drove Mable Jones into an exceptional life she went to college on a full scholarship she went to med school at Louisiana State University she served in the Navy she took out radiology she did not know any other black radiologists I assumed this would have been hard on her but she was insulted by the assumption she could not acknowledge any discomfort and she did not speak of herself as remarkable because it conceded too much because it sanctified tribal expectations when the only expectation that mattered should be rooted in an assessment of Mabel Jones and by those lights there was nothing surprising in her success because Mabel Jones was always pedal to the floor not over or around but through and if she was going to do it it must be done to death her disposition toward life was that of an elite athlete who knows the opponent is dirty and the refs are on the take but also knows the championship is one game away she called her son Prince Jones rocky in honor of her grandfather who went by rock I asked about his children because the fact is that I had no I had not known Prince all of that well he was among the people I would be happy to see at a party who I would describe to a friend as a good brother though I could not really account for all of his comings and goings so she sketched them for me that I've been so I made better understand she said that he'd once hammered a nail into an electrical socket and shorted out the whole house she said that he wanted to dressed himself in a suit and got down on a knee on one knee and sunk three times a lady to her she said he'd gone to private schools his entire life schools filled with dreamers but he made friends wherever he went in Louisiana and later in Texas I asked how his friend's parents treated her she said by then I was chief of radiology at the local hospital and so they treated me with respect she said this with no love in her eyes coldly as though she were explaining a mathematical function which is exactly what she was doing like his mother prince was smile in high school he was admitted to a Texas magnet school for math and science with students acquire college credit despite the school drawing from a state with roughly the population of angola australia or afghanistan prince was the only black child I asked dr. Jones if she had wanted him to go to Howard she smiled and said no then she added it is so nice to be able to talk about this this relax me a little because I could think of myself as something more than an intrusion I actually wish she wanted him to go for college and she said Harvard and if not Harvard Princeton and if not Princeton Yale and if not Yale Columbia and if not Columbia Stanford he was that caliber of student but like at least one third of all the students who came to Howard Prince was tired of having to represent to other people these Howard students would not like me they were the children of the Jackie Robinson elite whose parents rose up out of ghettos and the sharecropping fields when I went to the suburbs only to find that they carried the mark with them and could not escape even when they succeeded as so many did they were singled out made examples of transfigured into parables of diversity they were symbols and markers never children or young adults and so they came to Howard University to be normal and even more to see how broad the black normal really is Prince did not apply to Harvard he did not apply to Princeton he did not apply to Yale no Columbia no Stanford he only wanted to come to the mecca I acts dr. Jones if she regretted prints choosing Howard she gasped it was as though I had pushed too hard on her bruise no she said I regret that he's dead she said this with great composure and greater pain she said this with all the odd poise and direction that the American injury demands of you have you ever taken a hard look at those pictures from the sit-ins in the 60s I mean a hard serious look have you ever looked at the faces the faces are neither angry nor sad nor joyous they betray almost no emotion they look out past their tormentors pass us and focus on something way beyond anything ever known me I think they are fastened to their God a God whom I cannot know and in whom I do not believe but God or not the armor is all over them and it is real or perhaps it is not armor at all so many of these protesters were injured some of them so much that they would stand with the man who murdered Martin Luther King jr. perhaps it is a kind of life extension a kind of loan allowing you to take the assaults heaped upon you now and you pay down the debt later whatever it is that same look is what I see in those pictures noble and vacuous that was the look I saw in Mabel Jones he was in her shock brown eyes which well but did not break she helps so much under her control and I was sure in the days since her rocky was plundered since her lineage was robbed they had demanded nothing less and she could not lean on her country for help when it came to her son dr. Jones's country did would it best it forgot him the forgetting is habit it is yet another necessary component of the dream they have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery the terror that allowed them for centuries two pills of pill for the vote the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs they have forgotten because to remember what tumbled them out of the beautiful dream and forced them to live down here with us down here in the world I am convinced that the dreamers at least the dreamers of today would rather live white than live free in the dream they are Buck Rogers in the dream they are Prince Aragorn in the dream they are an entire race of Skywalker's to awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of men like all empires of men and are built on the destruction of the body it is sustained and nobility to make them vulnerable fallible breakable humans dr. Jones was asleep when the phone rang it was 5:00 a.m. and on the phone was a detective telling her she she drive to Washington rocky was in the hospital rocky had been shot she drove with her daughter she was sure he was still alive she paused several times as she explained this she went directly to the ICU rocky was not there a group of men with authority doctors lawyers detectives perhaps took her into a room and told her that he was gone she paused again she did not cry composure was too important now it was unlike anything I had felt before she told me it was extremely physically painful so much so that whenever I thought of him all I could do was pray and ask for mercy I thought I was going to lose my mind and go crazy I felt sick I felt like I was dying I asked if she expected that the police officer who shot Prince would be charged she said yes her voice was a cocktail of emotions she spoke like an American with the same expectations of fairness even fairness belated and begrudge that she took into medical school all those days ago and she spoke like a black woman with all the pain that undercuts those exact feelings I now wondered about her daughter who'd been recently married there was a picture on display of this daughter and her new husband she was not optimistic she was intensely worried about her daughter bringing a son into America because she could not save him she could not secure his body from the ritual violence that had claimed her son she compared America to wrong she said she thought the glory days of the country had long passed and even those glory days was sullied they had been built on the bodies of others and we can't get the message she said we don't understand that we are embracing our deaths I asked dr. Jones if her mother was still alive she told me that her mother had passed away in 2002 at the age of 89 I asked dr. Jones how her mother had taken Prince's death and her voice retreated into an almost whisper and dr. Jones said I don't know that she did she alluded to 12 years of slave there he was she said speaking of Solomon Northup he had means he had a family he was living like a human being and one racist act took him back and the same is true of me I spent years developing a career acquiring assets engaging responsibilities and one racist act it's all it takes and then she talked again of all that she had through great industry through unceasing labor quiet in the long journey from grinding poverty she spoke of how her children had been raised in luxury annual ski trips John's off to Europe she said that when her daughter was studying Shakespeare in high school she took her to England and when her daughter got her driver's license at 16 a Mazda 66 was waiting in front I sent some connection to this desire to give and the raw poverty of a youth I sensed it was all as much for her as it was for her children she said Prince had never taken to material things he loved to read he loved to travel but when he turned 23 she bought him a Jeep she had a huge purple bow put on it she told me that she could still see him there looking at that Jeep and simply saying thank you mom without interruption she added and that was the Jeep he was killed then after I left I sat in the car idle for a few minutes I thought of all the princes mother had invested him and I thought of all that was lost I thought of the loneliness that had sent him to the mecca and how the Makah how we could not save him how we ultimately cannot save ourselves I thought back on the sit-ins the protestors with their stoic faces the ones I had once scorned for hurling their bodies at all the worst things in life perhaps they knew something terrible about the world perhaps they so willingly parted with the security and the sanctity of the black body because neither security nor sanctity actually existed in the first place and all those old photographs from the 1960s all those films I beheld of black people prostrate before clubs and dogs were not simply shameful indeed were not shameful at all they were just true we are captured brother surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of a mare and this has happened here in our only home and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own perhaps that was is the hope of the movement to awaken the dreamers to rouse them to the facts of of what their need to be white they need to talk like they are white they need to think like they are white what it is that that dream has done and all the design flaws it is exposed of humanity and what it has done to the world but you cannot arrange your life around them you cannot arrange your life around the if in testable chance of the dreamers coming into consciousness our moment our time here is just too brief our bodies are too precious and you are here now and you must live and there is so much out here for you to live for not just in someone else's country but in your own home the warmth of dark energies they drew me to the mecca that you out Prince Jones the warmth of our particular world is beautiful no matter how brief and how breakable I think back to our trip to homecoming I think back to the warm blast rolling over us we were at the football game we were sitting in the bleachers with old friends and their children carrying neither four fumbles or first downs I remember looking towards the goalpost and watching a pack of alumni cheerleaders so enamored with Howard University that they had donned their old colors and took out the uniforms a little bit so they'd fit I remember them dancing they'd shake freeze shake again and when the crowd yelled do it do that do it a black woman two rows in front of me and her tightest jeans stood and she looked as though she was not somebody's mama and the past 20 years had barely been a week I remember walking down to the tailgate party without you I could not bring you but I have no problem telling you what I saw the entire Diaspora around me hustlers lawyers Kappas Buster's doctors barbers deltas drunkards geeks and nerds the DJ hollered into the mic the young folks pushed towards him a young man pulled out a bottle of cognac and twisted off the cop the cat a girl with him smile tilted her head back and bite and life fifty strains of marijuana were washing over me fifty strains of black people were washing over me and I felt myself disappearing into all of their bodies the birthmark of damnation faded and I could feel the weight of my arms and I could hear the Heath and my breath and I was not talking then because there was no point that was a moment a joyous moment beyond the dream a moment imbued by a power more gorgeous than any voting rights bill this power this black power originates in a view of the American galaxy taken from a dark and essential planet black power is the dungeon side view of Monticello which is to say the view that is taken in struggle and black power bursts a kind of understanding that illuminates all the galaxies and their truest colors even the dreamers lost in their great rivalry feel it for it is Billy that they reach for in sadness and mobb deep is what they holler and boldness and Eisley is what they hum in love and dre is what they yell in revelry and Aretha is the last sound they hear before dying we have made something down here we have taken the one-drop rules of the dreamers and we have flipped them they made us into a race we made ourselves into a people here at Howard at the mecca under pain of selection we have made a home as do black people on summer blocks marked with needles vowels and hopscotch squares as did black people dancing it out evarin parties as do black people at their family reunions where we all regard each other like the survivors of catastrophe as do black people toasting their cognac and German beers passing their blunts and debating emcees as do all of us who have voyaged through death to life upon these shores that was the love the power that drew in Prince Jones the power is not divinity but a deep knowledge of how fragile everything even the dream especially the dream really is sitting in the car I thought of dr. Jones's predictions of national I had heard such predictions all my life from Malcolm X and all of his posthumous followers who hollered that the dream was must weep what they saw I saw the same predictions in the words of Marcus Garvey who promised to return in a world when a vengeful ancestors an army of Middle Passage Undead no I left the Macan knowing that that was all two paths knowing that should the dreamers reap what they had sown we would reap it right along with them plunder has matured into habit and addiction the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos the mass rape of private prisons then engineer their own forgetting must inevitably plunder much more this is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline once the dreams parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horse power and wind but the dreamers have improved themselves in the damming of seas for voltage the extraction of coal the transmuting of oil into food have enabled them in expansion and plunder with no known president and this revolution has freed the dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the earth itself the earth is not our creation it has no respect for us it has no use for us and its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky something more fierce than Marcus Garvey's world is riding in on the whirlwind something more awful than all of our African ancestors is rising with the seas the two phenomena are known to each other it was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this Industrial Age it is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods and the method of transport through these new subdivisions across that great sprawl is the automobile the noose around the neck of the earth and ultimately the dreamers themselves I drove away from the house of Mabel Jones thinking of all of this I drove away as always thinking of you I do not believe we can stop them Samari because they must ultimately stop themselves and still I urge you to struggle struggle for the memory of your ancestors struggle for wisdom struggle for the warmth of Mecca struggle for your grandmother and grandfather struggle for your name but do not struggle for them hope for them pray for them if you are so moved but do not spend your struggle on anyone elses conversion the dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves as we did to understand that the field for their dream the stage where they have painted themselves white is the deathbed of us all self-deception has matured and to happen it is the same habit that endangers the planet the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos I saw these ghettos driving back from dr. Jones's home they were the same ghettos I'd seen in Chicago all those years ago the same ghettos where my mother was raised the same ghettos where my father was raised through the windshields I saw the mark of these ghettos the abundance of beauty shops churches liquor stores and crumbling housing and I felt the old fear through the windshield I saw the rain coming down in sheets thank you I just um I just wanted to quickly say so I was watching my time it looks like I got 250 seconds and counting so i'ma try to use it really quickly I just wanted to say you know I don't know if there any writers here but I made the joke about writing a book but the fact that I'm at it is um I've been thinking about for instance today you know he got gunned down and I've written about him in other forms just a little bit here in there and I have sat with this for so long you know and I have no idea well I have something I did but no total idea what his mother is sitting with it with his sister is sitting with but the people who really really knew him on an intimate level of sitting with but I wanted to read that tonight because when you when you watch that tape that man being shot in the back like that you know I want you to remember two things first of all for the majority of us there is no tape there was no tape we just you know died I said that's it you know you said Prince had you know backed at UV inter you know an officer's car had tried to kill him it matches no known description of any Prince Jones that anybody ever knew the second thing is to remember that you know when you have these folks died they had families that they would people that they were really really full functioning humans and the taking of that life it's just such a huge huge crime I would go so far as they said and for so much about history our you know kind of governance our style of governance our democracy I would go so far as to say it's pinned on exactly that kind of taking of life I really hate to say that you know but across American history this is not particularly unusual this is not particularly unique I hope you're horrified you should be horrified but it won't be the last time we'll be having this conversation again and again and again and again until we decide to look at this on some deeper issue deeper level thank you so much you

Channel: Lannan Foundation

Views: 25,667

Rating: 4.8142858 out of 5

Keywords: culture, politics, social issues, racism, cultural freedom, Lannan Foundation, Lensic Theater, Santa Fe, Ta-Nehisi Coates (Author)

Id: xbT6s8OX_EQ

Length: 52min 3sec (3123 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 10 2015